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Posts Tagged ‘Daisy Newman’

I’ve now read four novels set in the Quaker community of fictitious Kendal, Rhode Island: Indian Summer of the Heart; I Take Thee, Serenity; Diligence in Love, and now The Autumn’s Brightness. It seems I never blogged about Diligence in Love, which I read several months ago. That one was about an insufferably boring New Yorker, Vaughn Hill, who travels to Kendal for a work project and finds peace there, eventually moving there with her husband and teenaged children. Vaughn and her family appear briefly in The Autumn’s Brightness, although Oliver and Loveday (of Indian Summer of the Heart) do not.

Anyway, the protagonist of The Autumn’s Brightness is named Diligence, or Dilly, which confused me for a while, but Newman explains in the book that diligence in love is a Quaker concept referring to what is needed to sustain loving feelings during hard times in a relationship. The novel opens when Dilly, a widow whose children have left home, travels to new York to visit her brainless, materialistic cousin Elmira and meets a man who makes a deep impression on her. Despite her determination to avoid a romantic entanglement, Dilly finds Mr. Durand Smith impossible to forget, and he seems equally smitten. But could he just be after her money?

A sweet story, which I finished in just one day. But my favorite is still Indian Summer of the Heart!

I am not in the habit of reading abridged books (The Origin of Species being a notable exception!), but sometime in the 1980s, a Reader’s Digest volume containing two abridged novels came into my possession. One of the novels was Dick Francis’ Banker, which I duly read and then forgot so completely that during my Dick Francis phase, when I read everything Francis wrote (including his biography of jockey Lester Piggott), I reread Banker without realizing that I had already read it. The other one was a very sweet love story called Indian Summer of the Heart by Daisy Newman: Quaker farmer/writer Oliver Otis and feminist/college president Loveday Mead find love together in their eighth decade. I was fascinated by the description of Quaker beliefs and lifestyle. Every so often, I would pick it up and reread it, or reread parts of it; and when I realized that it was actually the sequel to another book about Oliver and the Quaker community in Kendal, R.I., I promised myself that I would read that, too. But then I would forget to look for I Take Thee, Serenity at the library or in bookstores–until this month, when I finally searched, came up with nothing (neither in the Montgomery County Public Libraries, nor in the University of Maryland’s libraries), and decided on an impulse to buy a used copy (it’s out of print) for $0.01 (plus shipping and handling of course). While I waited impatiently for it to arrive, I quickly reread Indian Summer of the Heart in its abridged version for the umpteenth time, and enjoyed it as much as ever.

In that book, Oliver is sharing his home, Firbank Farm, with his young cousin Serenity Holland, her husband Peter, and their toddler son Ross. I Take Thee, Serenity tells the story of how Serenity and Peter came to live at Firbank. It begins in their sophomore year at a small college in New York State, in the 1970s. They are in love and sleeping together, much to the dismay of Rennie’s parents, who urge them to marry, while Peter’s parents would prefer that they not marry while they are still in college. Rennie’s parents assume they will have a big wedding and start to plan it, but Rennie and Peter are reluctant. They become interested in the idea of a simple Quaker wedding, and the book opens with Rennie traveling to Kendal, Rhode Island to meet her father’s cousin Oliver Otis to ask him about the possibility of a Quaker ceremony. The encounter proves to be life-changing; Rennie is captivated by Firbank, by Oliver and his artist wife Daphne’s loving welcome, and by the simple friendliness of the entire Friends community in Kendal. But before the wedding can take place, both Rennie and Peter have a lot of growing up to do, over several years. Rennie especially is a childish know-it-all at the beginning of the novel; by the time she and Peter are man and wife, she has matured considerably. I didn’t like her at all in the first chapters, but had come round by the end.

And then I discovered that this novel is actually the third in The Kendal Trilogy! Now I have to find Diligence in Love and Dilly to complete the set.